No Arabic abstract
We have developed and characterized a symmetry-protected superconducting qubit that offers simultaneous exponential suppression of energy decay from charge and flux noise, and dephasing from flux noise. The qubit consists of a Cooper-pair box (CPB) shunted by a superinductor, thus forming a superconducting loop. Provided the offset charge on the CPB island is an odd number of electrons, the qubit potential corresponds to that of a $cos phi / 2$ Josephson element, preserving the parity of fluxons in the loop via Aharonov-Casher interference. In this regime, the logical-state wavefunctions reside in disjoint regions of phase space, thereby ensuring the protection against energy decay. By switching the protection on, we observed a ten-fold increase of the decay time, reaching up to $100 mu mathrm{s}$. Though the qubit is sensitive to charge noise, the sensitivity is much reduced in comparison with the charge qubit, and the charge-noise-induced dephasing time of the current device exceeds $1 mu mathrm{s}$. Implementation of the full dephasing protection can be achieved in the next-generation devices by combining several $cos phi / 2$ Josephson elements in a small array.
We measure the coherence of a new superconducting qubit, the {em low-impedance flux qubit}, finding $T_2^* sim T_1 sim 1.5mu$s. It is a three-junction flux qubit, but the ratio of junction critical currents is chosen to make the qubits potential have a single well form. The low impedance of its large shunting capacitance protects it from decoherence. This qubit has a moderate anharmonicity, whose sign is reversed compared with all other popular qubit designs. The qubit is capacitively coupled to a high-Q resonator in a $lambda/2$ configuration, which permits the qubits state to be read out dispersively.
We demonstrate amplification of a microwave signal by a strongly driven two-level system in a coplanar waveguide resonator. The effect known from optics as dressed-state lasing is observed with a single quantum system formed by a persistent current (flux) qubit. The transmission through the resonator is enhanced when the Rabi frequency of the driven qubit is tuned into resonance with one of the resonator modes. Amplification as well as linewidth narrowing of a weak probe signal has been observed. The laser emission at the resonators fundamental mode has been studied by measuring the emission spectrum. We analyzed our system and found an excellent agreement between the experimental results and the theoretical predictions obtained in the dressed-state model.
We demonstrate coherent control and measurement of a superconducting qubit coupled to a superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator with a dynamically tunable qubit-cavity coupling strength. Rabi oscillations are measured for several coupling strengths showing that the qubit transition can be turned off by a factor of more than 1500. We show how the qubit can still be accessed in the off state via fast flux pulses. We perform pulse delay measurements with synchronized fast flux pulses on the device and observe $T_1$ and $T_2$ times of 1.6 and 1.9 $mu$s, respectively. This work demonstrates how this qubit can be incorporated into quantum computing architectures.
Coherence of superconducting qubits can be improved by implementing designs that protect the parity of Cooper pairs on superconducting islands. Here, we introduce a parity-protected qubit based on voltage-controlled semiconductor nanowire Josephson junctions, taking advantage of the higher harmonic content in the energy-phase relation of few-channel junctions. A symmetric interferometer formed by two such junctions, gate-tuned into balance and frustrated by a half-quantum of applied flux, yields a cos(2{phi}) Josephson element, reflecting coherent transport of pairs of Cooper pairs. We demonstrate that relaxation of the qubit can be suppressed tenfold by tuning into the protected regime.
We report a direct measurement of the low-frequency noise spectrum in a superconducting flux qubit. Our method uses the noise sensitivity of a free-induction Ramsey interference experiment, comprising free evolution in the presence of noise for a fixed period of time followed by single-shot qubit-state measurement. Repeating this procedure enables Fourier-transform noise spectroscopy with access to frequencies up to the achievable repetition rate, a regime relevant to dephasing in ensemble-averaged time-domain measurements such as Ramsey interferometry. Rotating the qubits quantization axis allows us to measure two types of noise: effective flux noise and effective critical-current or charge noise. For both noise sources, we observe that the very same 1/f-type power laws measured at considerably higher frequencies (0.2-20 MHz) are consistent with the noise in the 0.01-100-Hz range measured here. We find no evidence of temperature dependence of the noises over 65-200 mK, and also no evidence of time-domain correlations between the two noises. These methods and results are pertinent to the dephasing of all superconducting qubits.